Contents

The
paper gives
a short account of the rise of information ethics as a major discipline
within information science (introduction). The first part presents some
of the ethical challenges of digital libraries as stated in some recent
conference announcements and projects. The main part of the paper deals
with the question of how cyberspace in general and the space of digital
libraries in particular could and should fit into the life-space or
life
world of people. This phenomenological approach is connected to an
ethics
of care. The overlap between both spaces invokes the question of
interface
design into the larger one of ‘interspace design’ (T. Winograd).

With such
a design comes an awareness of the gap between the information poor and
the information rich within a society as well as between countries and
regions. To deal with these inequities, we offer two suggestions: the
establishment
of community freenets and terminals in public spaces. Some of UNESCO’s
activities, achievements and projects in the field of information
ethics
are presented as other avenues to redress these inequities. We also
highlight
questions of interpretation and of situational relevance with regard to
written records. Access and preservation are seen as the two main
ethical
challenges of digital libraries. The question of preservation is
briefly
discussed.

"IN a
village of La
Mancha,
the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not
long
since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an
old
buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. (DON QUIXOTE by
Miguel
de Cervantes Translated by John Ormsby)"http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes

Introduction

The
ethical
issues associated with digital libraries can only be discussed relative
to the major research achievements that exist in the field of
information
ethics. The rise of information ethics as a major discipline within
Library
and Information Science is attested in the increasing number of
publications
and public events.

The Encyclopedia
of Library and Information Science edited
by Allen
Kent has published comprehensive articles in this field, namely Richard
Rubin’s and Thomas Froehlich’s Ethical Aspects of Library and
Information
Science (Rubin/Froehlich 1996) following the one by Lee Finks and
Elisabeth
Soekefeld on Professional Ethics (Finks/Soekefeld 1993). There
are
several articles on special themes like:

Martha
Smith has recently published a state-of-the-art report Information
Ethics
in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (Smith
1997). Thomas Froehlich has published his highly recommended UNESCO
report Survey and Analysis of Legal and Ethical Issues for Library
and Information
Services (Froehlich 1997). Robert Hauptman should be particularly
acknowledged
as editor of the Journal of Information Ethics.

I
would
like to mention also the contributions in the Encyclopedia of
Applied
Ethics edited by Ruth Chadwick which includes articles such
as:

Internet
Protocol by Duncan Langford, Computer
Security by Eugene Spafford, Information
Management by Richard Mason, Accounting
and Business Ethics by Harold Langenderfer, Confidentiality
by Mary Armstrong, Corporate
Responsibility by Celia Wells, Ethics
in Corporations by Francis Aguilar, Freedom
of Speech by Larry Alexander, Freedom
of the Press in the USA by Stephen Klaidman, Informed
Consent by Jonathan Moreno, Arthur Caplan and Paul
Wolpe, Science
and Engineering Ethics by R. E. Spier, Scientific
Publishing by Beth Fischer and Michael Zigmond, World
Ethics by Nigel Dower, Privacy by Edmund Byrne
and Research
Ethics by Caroline Whitbeck (Chadwick 1998).

Many
schools in our field offer courses on ethical and legal aspects of the
profession. At the Fachhochschule Stuttgart we have integrated
information
ethics in the undergraduate curriculum both as a general course as well
as a special course (Capurro 1998).
We have organized three workshops on information ethics so far, dealing
with: Information
rich/information poor (1996), Digital
Libraries (1997) and Cyberculture
(1998).

In
1995 Klaus Wiegerling, Andreas Brellochs and I edited a multilingual
reader Informationsethik (Capurro
1995). We have created a website
on information ethics and we will open a web space for
international
information, interaction and discourse under the heading International
Center for Information Ethics (ICIE). We invite our colleagues to
take
an active part in this project by creating an international network for
teaching and research on information ethics.

The
Fachhochschule Stuttgart was one of the partners of the MURIEL-Project
which was a collaborative project
set
up in the framework of the European Union’s Telematics Libraries (LIB)
Programme (LIB 3-3007). The project included industrial companies like
TELES in Germany and Euromédia Formation in France, and research
centers like Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy, the FH
Stuttgart
in Germany, The British Library in the United Kingdom and the
Hogeschool
Maastricht in the Netherlands. The Fachhochschule Stuttgart delivered
multimedia
contents on information ethics which we will soon make available
through
the ICIE platform.

A
major
recent international event in our field was the UNESCO-Virtual Forum on
Information Ethics which culminated in UNESCO’s Second International
Congress on Ethical,
Legal and Societal Challenges of Cyberspace from 1-3 October 1998 in
Monte-Carlo.
Areas such as information in the public domain, multilingualism,
privacy,
confidentiality and security as well as social, economic and
multicultural
responsibilities were discussed and some practical recommendations for
an information policy of UNESCO were
made.

Digital
libraries are indeed an important field of practice and research in the
growing cyberculture. In the following presentation I will first point
to the general issues of the ethical debate on digital libraries. In a
second step I will explore the notion of space, as a key ethical aspect
of digital libraries. In the conclusion I will refer to the question of
sustainability. All this analysis goes back to simple but not easy
questions
such as: What are we doing when we create, develop and use digital
libraries?
Do we consider enough the consequences of digital libraries with regard
to local and global cultures? And what are their effects in the long
term?
Is it possible to see this now? How far? What are the challenges with
regard
to human rights? And, finally, who is responsible for what concern(s),
and what is the impact of ethical thinking on such concerns? These
questions
can only be answered through an international and interdisciplinary
discourse.
My remarks are an invitation to this discourse, and hopefully, an
incentive
as well.

I.
Digital Libraries as an Ethical Challenge

There
is an increasing number of international congresses and projects
dealing
with digital libraries. A quick review of some of the announcements
shows
that ethical aspects are a pervading question. The ASIS Annual
Conference
1997 on Digital Collections was announced with the following
statement:

"Poised
at the intersection of research, scholarship, communication,
publishing,
entertainment, and commerce, digital collections have the potential to
combine the ideas and methodologies of wide-ranging disciplines in
unique
and creative ways and of effecting technological and social change.
This
integration can enrich perspectives and expand our ability to
understand
how the various sectors could benefit from and participate in emerging
global networks. But it can also lead to social, economic, and
political
isolation, control, and mediocrity." (http://www.asis.org/annual-97/ASIS97.htm)

Such
a description raises all sorts of questions: How will access be
guaranteed?
What returns can be expected on the investments? What are the issues of
intellectual access? How can the authenticity, validity, and
reliability
of objects be identified and maintained? Theses questions are
simultaneously
technical and ethical. They concern the interests and impacts of
digital
collections on users, fund-providers, developers, and
maintainers.

The
same can be said with regard to the announcement of the ASIS Annual
Conference
1999 dealing with Knowledge: Creation, Organization, Use. Note
the
boldfaced keywords:

The Journal
of Global Information Management. An official publication of the
Information
Resources Management Association announces its 1997 issue on
Global
Information Technology IT in Library and Information Management
(Associate
Editor: Patricia Fletcher, University of Maryland)with
the
following statement:

"The
role and function of the libraries in a digital world is uncertain and
evolving. How libraries respond to the many implications of the
information
technologies will have a determining effect on their sustainability.
Ethical
issues of privacy, intellectual property, censorship, and knowledge
organization
are of major concerns to libraries in today's networked environment.
Policy
issues pertaining to first amendment rights, telecommunications and
universal
internet service, and the national information infrastructure will help
shape the digital future for libraries." (http://www.idea-group.com/jgim987.htm)

An excellent overview on digital libraries research is provided by the
website of the Digital Libraries (D-Lib) Program which is based at the Corporation
for National Research Initiativesand
is sponsored
by the Defense Advances Research Project Agency (DARPA) on
behalf
of the Digital Libraries Initiative under Grant No. N66001-98-1-8908 (http://www.dlib.org/dlib.html).
As an example of best practice in this field I would like to highlight
the Cervantes Project 2001. The Cervantes Project 2001 housed
at
Texas A&M University is a joint collaboration of the Department of
Modern and Classical Languages, the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos
(Alcalá
de Henares), the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL) and
Dr.
Fred Jehle of Indiana-Purdue University (http://csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/).

With
respect to such projects, we can ask the following questions. Why are
ethical
or legal issues particularly relevant in relation to the Internet in
general
and to digital libraries in particular? The answer lies in the
realization
that in a global environment, the national legal regulations are,
contrary
to their nature, a weak tool for shaping human action. Local
customs
or moralities and their political, religious and/or military
agents
tend to feel endangered by an anonymous, global and non-controllable
communication
system. This is a kind of second order paradox if we consider that freedom
of the press was one of the key achievements of modernity. In a
second
step of its evolution, the technical written word became also a
technical
spoken word through mass media and a major force within democracy. This
process has reached a new turn in the sense that the local political
agents
are now more objects than subjects of a potentially universal access to
a global and decentralized information and communication structure.
Freedom
of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of access become now, at
the
end of modernity, simultaneous rights (Capurro 1996a).

This
new turn has consequences for individuals as well as organizations and
societies as a whole. We have arrived at a rather unique historical
situation
where traditional hierarchies of expertise between elder and younger
generations
in families and educational institutions are being undermined or
challenged
by digital forms of knowledge production, access and distribution. This
is no less the case in companies, where the change from hierarchical to
networked organizational structures leads to new forms of knowledge
distribution
and access. Knowledge becomes a key asset to be shared and protected in
different ways by stakeholders and shareholders. To what extent this
situation
can be compared to the ones brought about by other media revolutions is
an interesting question for research. Optimists and pessimists are
equally
right insofar as the questioning of knowledge monopolies, including
their
censorship and selection practices on the basis of networked storage,
brings
new opportunities for overcoming space and time barriers but also new
forms
of power and control.

We
can summarize these challenges by saying that the question of
knowledge,
its selection, storage and accessibility, is a key ethical and legal
issue
in a society which predicates for itself the attributes of information
and knowledge. In contrast to paper libraries, digital libraries
are obviously not accessible in the same way. The global character of
the
Internet would give the opportunity, one may hope, to a higher degree
of
freedom of information and communication as was the case with paper
libraries
in their inception and evolution in light of their geographical and
political
constraints. Are we going to take a step further towards the
achievement
of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR)?:

"Everyone
has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes
freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and
impart information and ideas to any media and regardless of
frontiers."

Or
are digital libraries a new and even a more subtle form of knowledge
segregation
and colonialism? Will digital libraries On the Threshold of the
21st
Century become Gateways to an Enlightened World quoting
the
topic of the 65th IFLA General Conference in 1999? These are
global questions indeed. But they are also local
questions.
Digital libraries are located in the kind of global space we use to
call
cyberspace. But their access is always local. It seems as if the
question
of space should play a major role in ethical thinking.

II.
From interface design to interspace design

It
may
seem prima facie odd to explore the question of space under an
ethical
viewpoint. This impression vanishes as soon as we think about the
significance
of public spaces in people’s lives and particularly about the
significance
of the public spaces we call libraries. But what is space? We usually
think
about space in Cartesian terms. We dissociate the way we live in space,
our life-space, from the neutral and objective measurable space that we
could call scientific or metrical space. We do the same with
time.
In addition, under the domination of the scientific viewpoint, we also
tend to assort that space and time in the first sense are purely
subjective.
Phenomenology - Husserl’s lifeworld and Heidegger’s being-in-the-world
- has taught us to see more clearly this difference and to think the
relationship
between both views in a non-usual or non-cartesian manner by inverting
their relationship.

In
his commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time Hubert Dreyfus
makes
the point of spatiality as an existential concern and stresses the
priority
of public space over individual ways of structuring space (Dreyfus
1990,
pp. 128ss). As social beings our life is always entangled in a network
of relationships with the lives of the others, i.e. with the ways the
others
take care of things in space and time. Individual and social concern
about
space are not separable. Existential concern about space means
eliminating
or to maintaining in different ways and degrees the distance between
each
other and between ourselves and other beings or tools in everyday life.
The very possibility of being able to ‘dis-tance’ other beings,
bringing
them into nearness or leaving them in remoteness, is a function of this
specific human way of being involved in space, by articulating it in
different
ways. Dreyfus uses the word de-severance for translating Heidegger’s Ent-fernung.
In both cases the hyphen stresses the meaning of overcoming or
establishing
a distance. What is near or what is far depends on the kind of
attention
we give to beings. Although my glasses in physical measurement are very
near to my eyes, with my attention I may be absorbed in, say, the
magnificent
Cervantes-website and the possibilities opened by its digital library.
In this case, the website is thus closer existentially or
phenomenologically
to me than my glasses.

Where
are we when we are in cyberspace? In what kind of space are
digital
libraries supposed to be? If we take a Cartesian viewpoint we split
life-space
where we physically are, from a kind of pure symbolic or knowledge
space
separated from the individual minds. It makes no fundamental difference
if we connect this world of ‘knowledge in itself’ or World 3 as
Karl Popper called it, with the physical and the psychic worlds. This
schema
may be useful for other purposes but it does not allow to grasp our
‘being-in-space’
under an existential viewpoint. The counterpart to this is looking to
people
as subjects having an internal world of mental states which they manage
to change according to new representations that may come to their minds
through their interaction with computer devices. This is, indeed, the
usual
Cartesian way to look at ourselves (and our selves!) as well as at our
knowledge and at the physical world ‘out there’. For a detailed
criticism
of this view see my (Capurro1992) and (Capurro 1986). It takes little
effort
to conceive not only the autonomous world of ‘knowledge in itself’ but
also of its technical infrastructure as having its own life, building a
kind of super intelligence. This is, of course, nothing but
cybermythology.

Let
us consider the phenomenological approach. What happens with distances
in cyberspace? What kind of spatiality is being instantiated? How do
things
become present to or remain far from our attention? Of course there is
the computer device itself which, as in the case of my glasses, is
normally
not primarily the object of my care and attention, at least as long as
there is no system breakdown! In contrast to the ways we take our bodilydistances to things, say, in a room, the Internet allows us
to overcome
distances to things and people in a way similar to the telephone or the
TV. In which way? By eliminating distances to digital things located in
different places and bringing them to the same place i.e. to
the
interface. But the cyberspace is not a separate space with regard to
the
life-space. We are still dis-tancing and orientation is given
through
our attention to what we get on the screen, for instance, in the form
of
frames and hyperlinks. What are the existential or, as we could also
say, ethical consequences of this?

In
his contribution to the workshop on Cyberculture
at Stuttgart in 1998 the Australian philosopher Michael Eldred
reminded us of the origin of the word ethics coming from the Greek word
ethos which means habit or way of dwelling, depending on
whether
it is written with a short or a long E, respectively. The Latin word
for
ethos is habitare , which is the source of the word inhabitants as
dwellers
of a country. To dwell has to do with the ways we create common living
places through customs. We call this activity a culture.
According
to Eldred the English word haunting means originally something
we
usually do or the place we usually go to. It also refers to the
activity
of beings we call ghosts, particularly when they disturb the places
where
we usually live! Cyberspace is not a kind of separate space, as the
Cartesian
view would suggest. We are still in a room or, say, in a
cybercafé
when we surf on the net which is a metaphor that real surfers, who are
exposed to the risks and fascinations of this sport, do not like very
much.
But at the same time our actions in this medium allow us to have a kind
of ghostly feeling or a haunting experience as Eldred says. There are
millions
of places on the net and there will probably soon be hundreds of
digital
libraries, but their common place is the interface, i.e. the place
where
we eliminate the distance from our life-world. In other words, the
interface
is not the door to a kind of mythical or objective space of ‘knowledge
in itself’, but, on the contrary, it is just another part of the tools
of our everyday life. Through it cyberspace becomes a part of our
life-space.

When
we are in cyberspace, at the website of the Cervantes digital library
for
instance, we have indeed a kind of haunting experience. But it
would
be a Cartesian split to dissociate the ‘ghostly feeling’ from the very
familiar experience of being in a place of everyday dwelling. In the
case
of digital libraries the ethical challenge is, on the one hand, to
design
them in such a way that we can feel at home in their homepage. Not just
that we can use their devices in a way that they have a tendency to
disappear
when we manipulate them in order to get what we want, but that they
become
part of a worldly structure of public interrelations, i.e. that they
can
be considered and used as belonging to the public life-space. This
entanglement
produces, on the other hand, dramatic changes in our local
life-space
as far as it becomes part of the cyberspace’s referential grid. But it
would be, again, a mystification to consider the cyberspace separate
from
the life-world. The life-world is not merely the local world of
everyday
life but the world-space itself, open to everybody and to every body.
We would never become astonished about our haunting experiences if we
were
not be able to regard them as a specific form of our original spatial di-stancing
being.

An
important difference between our spatiality in a symbolic medium like
the
Internet and the printing medium is the fact that in cyberspace we can
do things with words. I call this digital doing actio digitalis in
distans.
This possibility of our digital beingquestions the modern
split
between linguistic symbols and actions. The Enlightenment conceived the
printing medium as a free space for information and communication. The
classic medium was, of course, oral speech. The classic public space
was,
for instance, the oral space of the Greek marketplace (agorá)
but also the theatre. The cynical school was fond of their freedom of
speech
(parrhesía). For Kant the freedom of thought depends on
the
freedom of communicating our thoughts. Thinking is nothing that happens
in an isolated spirit, which is either pure speculation or madness.
Thinking
is the product of receiving and communicating messages according to
one’s
own judgement. This would imply that there should be a space or medium
free of censorship. This space was for Kant the Gutenberg marketplace,
the communication of printed thoughts. The price for this was not only
the split between thinking and action but the renunciation of directly
interfering in the political sphere through the printing medium
(Capurro
1995, pp. 110-112, Capurro 1996a and Capurro 1996b).

The
Australian philosopher Alec McHoul argues in his Internet article
Cyberbeing
and -space that cyber devices are part of our being-in-the-world but
that
we are involved with them in a different way than with real devices.
Managing
real devices is of the kind of a practical use or skill, a knowing
how;
we uses them as the real devices they are. When we operate with
cyber devices, however, for instance, when we play golf with an
electronic
glove, there is a switch to an as if it were a real golf ball. He
writes:

"To
understand cyberbeing "as" would be to over-normalise it; to understand
it purely "as if" would be to over-virtualise it. Instead, because
cyberbeings
rapidly fluctuate between these actual and virtual understandings, they
may be said to have the characteristics once ascribed to ghosts. (...)
Cyberbeing is (...) to use Derrida’s term "spectral" (Specters). (...)
There is no just one cyberpractice but many; though each is held
together
by a loose kind of family resemblance; and that resemblance is the
unbounded
or fuzzy space between the virtual and actual." (McHoul)

A web
of hyperlinks is a potential constituent of the "spectral" or cyber
environments,
cyber performances, MUDs and MOOs or dildonics (coupling of devices and
human-body movements). E-mail and hypertext, -links, media retain
certain
pre-spectral forms of equipmentality, leaving open such possibilities
like
being-here-and-being-there, virtual-actual transitions, etc. Both
equipmentalities,
the real and the cyber, give rise to different, negative and positive,
moral perspectives, as we know it from the history of other media
revolutions
like the change from orality to writing in Ancient Greece or the
invention
of the printing press. One morality will see in, say, digital
libraries,
the loss of real public library spaces. Another will only see the
possibility
of universal access or instant global sharing. A spectral library would
be one of unpredictable capabilities on the basis of hard- and software
combinations. But there is, of course, also an ethical dimension of
care
for the possible and potential in this case.

The
digital dimension is a kind of overlap between the real and the cyber
or
spectral in the sense that things can be done in cyberspace which are
neither
purely of the kind of the real ‘as’ nor of the spectral ‘as if’. We can
do real things with digital symbols at a distance in a quasi spectral
way.
Documents in a digital library have a kind of ‘haunting presence’. The ethical
question is then, how do we manage to bring
digital libraries
existentially near to people? Who will use them and who not and why?
This
means the awareness that the cyberspace as a whole and digital
libraries
as part of it is not a kind of separate space but that it belongs to
people’s
life-space and to their possibilities of being. We do not just
individually
or socially interact first in a separate world called cyberspace
through
an interface, but rather, this interaction is embedded or situated in a
life-space from the very beginning. This is also the case with regard
to
all kinds of spectral possibilities. Quoting a term coined by
Terry
Winograd, interface design should be regarded as belonging to the
people’s
interspace. In his article From Computing Machinery to Interaction
DesignTerry Winograd explains the shift from interface
to interspace
as follows:

"Taking
seriously that the design role is the construction of the "interspace"
in which people live, rather than an "interface" with which they
interact,
the interaction designer needs to take a broader view that includes
understanding
how people and societies adapt to new technologies. To continue with
our
automotive analogy, imagine that on the fiftieth anniversary of the
"Association
for Automotive Machinery" a group of experts had been asked to
speculate
on the "the next fifty years of driving." They might well have
envisioned
new kinds of engines, automatic braking, and active suspension systems.
But what about interstate freeways, drive-in movies, and the decline of
the inner city? These are not exactly changes in "driving," but in the
end they are the most significant consequences of automotive
technology.
Successful interaction design requires a shift from seeing the
machinery
to seeing the lives of the people using it. In this human dimension,
the
relevant factors become hard to quantify, hard to even identify. This
difficulty
is magnified when we try to look at social consequences." (Winograd
1997)

According
to the Stanford Digital Libraries Project the following services should
be provided by digital libraries: resource discovery, retrieving
information,
interpreting information, managing information and sharing information.
Each service is technical and ethical at the same time. Under an
ethical
perspective, tool design means helping people to master their lives.
According
to Winograd interspace design should be as practical and rigorous as
the
engineering disciplines, it should place human concerns and needs at
the
center like the design disciplines, and it should take a broad view of
social possibilities and responsibilities like the social
disciplines.

How
do we manage to bring digital libraries existentially close to people?
Or, better, how do people manage by themselves to bring digital
libraries
near to themselves? This question cannot be isolated from the following
question: How do we learn to become citizens of cyberspace? How do we
integrate
cyberspace in general and digital libraries in particular into everyday
public space? This is a question that concerns the growing gap between
the information poor and the information rich at a global and local
level.
Cyberspace is in fact a space shared mainly by rich countries and by
rich
users in poor countries. We discussed this in the UNESCO Virtual Forum.
As a chair of this topic I summarized the discussion by making the
following
recommendations:

Bring
net access to poor countries by putting existing resources to sensible
use in order to promote the development of global and local information
cultures and economies.

Support
the development of a World Information Ethos

Support
concrete projects in information poor countries in order to create
country-specific
information centers.

Promote
public awareness on these matters through virtual forums, publications,
and conferences.

UNESCO
should promote the rights of non-English-speaking-countries and their
economic
interests.

UNESCO
should promote topics in information ethics to be included in curricula
at all levels.

Promotion
activities through international organizations should be based on
grassroots
efforts as well as on a decentralized and well-coordinated basis.

These
recommendations were emphasized by the statements of the participants
of
the Second UNESCO
International Congress on the Ethical, Legal and
Societal
Challenges of Cyberspace.

Not
only UNESCO but also other UN organizations such as the World Bank with
the Information for Development Program and the UNDP, and
Non-Governmental
Organizations (NGOs), particularly the Internet Society, are engaged in
different developing projects for which digital libraries are already
developed
or of which they should become a part. Digital libraries as public
spaces
for the developed countries should be shared as the public space of the
information poor. But this is, of course, only half the challenge. The
other more important half is how information poor countries can create
and use their own digital knowledge.

This
is also a vital question between the information poor and rich within a
country. How do we allow the cyberspace to become a part of people’s
space?
Vincent Bosco suggests in his UNESCO contribution the establishment of
freenets and the installation of terminals in public life-spaces. He
writes:

"The
establishment of community nets or freenets which bring together people
in a city, town or neighbourhood, providing essential information about
public services, in addition to all of the material normally found on
the
Internet. Freenets provide two essential elements missing in most of
the
commercial networks. First because they make use of servers provided by
educational non-profit or other donor organizations, freenets offer low
cost access for users. This is particularly important for low income
people
who, even in the most developed societies, have little chance of making
use of the net. Secondly, they locate terminals in public spaces like
post
offices, libraries, schools, and markets, enabling people to make use
of
the net without having to purchase a computer." (Bosco 1998)

In other
words, Bosco suggests that cyberspace be treated as a constituent of
the
life-space. Developing an ethics of care with regard to digital
libraries means acknowledging the ethical imperative or, to say it in a
less Kantian manner, the ethical indicative to integrate digital space
within the life-space and, particularly, within the existing network of
paper libraries (Capurro 1996c). This should be seen as
a complementary
aspect to the possibility of sharing digital libraries within private
life-spaces.
But in both cases the challenge of democratic accessibility remains.
This
symbiotic relation will change the character of both spaces, the local
and the global. The question is, how far? How fast? And who will be the
beneficiaries? The sense of community in general and of the research
community
in particularly will change as it did with printing technology and
paper
libraries.

Due to the specific spatial and, of course, temporalcharacter
of digital libraries they have a higher potential of universality than
in the case of books. They bring us potentially near, on the one hand,
to the ideals of Enlightenment. But there is, on the other hand, no
determinism
in this process. We have to locally shape this potentiality.
And,
finally, the character of European Enlightenment changes at the end of
modernity. The Internet is not the completion of the French
Encyclopedia
or an embodiment of the ideal of a global transparency. But it does
open
local communities to global access and it creates new kinds of global
communities,
both on the basis of digital libraries, particularly in the fields of
education,
culture, scientific research and economy but also, although not visible
at present, in various fields of everyday life.

In
1935 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset spoke at the
international
library congress. He said that the contents of books need to be
interpreted
and shared within a situation or a circunstancia as they contain
decontextualized propositions. In order to understand what they say the
reader must bring, as the theory of interpretation or hermeneutics
states,
a pre-understanding. He writes (my translation):

"Now,
writing by fixating a narrative is able to preserve only the words, not
the living intuitions that make up its meaning. The vital situation
from
which they have grown evaporates irremediably: time, in its constant
gallop,
takes it up on the back. The book, preserving only the words, preserves
only the ash of real thinking. In order for it to be reborn and to live
further, the book is not enough. It is necessary that another human
being
reproduces in his (her) person the vital situation to which that
thinking
was an answer. Only then is it possible to say that the sentences of a
book have been understood and that the telling of the past has been
redeemed.
Plato says this when he states that only the thoughts of the book are
legitimate
sons (‘huieis gnesíous’ Phaidr. 278 a) because only then
are they really thought and can recuperate their native evidence (‘enargés’).
But this is something that can be done only by someone who is following
the same track as the author (‘to tauton ichnos metiónti’
Phaidr. 276d) and who therefore has thought by himself before reading
the
book and knows its subject as well as its courses. If this is not done,
when one reads a lot and thinks little, the book is a terribly
efficient
device for the falsification of human life." (Ortega 1962, p. 88-89)

This is
true with regard to both kinds of libraries, the paper and the digital
ones. Both need a living context of access as well as of
interpretation.
The public accessibility as I have been discussing it in this paper, is
a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the process of creative
reading and thinking. This is by no way a plea for traditionalist paper
thinking. Neither was it Ortega’s intention. In the Preface to the Diccionario
Enciclopédico Abreviado bearing the title The
Book-Machine
("El libro-máquina"), Ortega writes in 1939 that human memory
can
be relieved on the basis of "book machines" or "cultural machines" ("máquinas
culturales"), but encyclopedias do not aspire any more to a global
(Greek: ‘enkyklos’) and definite knowledge. Knowledge is and will
remain
fragmentary. This is not vulgar Postmodernism but it is Ortega’s
diagnosis
of the knowledge situation in the 20th century in contrast
to
the encyclopedic spirit of 18th century Enlightenment.
Knowledge
is not something we can master as a whole. Culture and wisdom are not a
key that would allow us to dominate chaos but are themselves "a forest
where we get lost". Ortega writes in 1939:

"Whether
we want to or not, we have to manage our knowledge" (Ortega 1962, p.
139).

On the
basis of global knowledge accessibility, thinking is apparently easier
than it was with Gutenberg technology. The new kind of
post-Enlightenment
digital globalism suggests, on the one hand, that with good retrieval
techniques
and a comfortable text processing system, the question of
interpretation
i.e. the question of asking oneself what is the unspoken situation to
which
the text is a possible answer as well as the question of application,
i.e.
the question of asking oneself what is the situational relevance of
global
knowledge resources become easier. This is not the case. Both practices
are not easier, they are different with regard to the problems of
decontextualization
and lack of intermediation.

There are some aspects of orality, like e-mail
interactivity, that are integrated in cyberspace on a global basis and
that can be connected to the services of digital libraries, in order to
help, for instance, with the interpretation of Don Quijote. We
think
differently since we have paper libraries and particularly public ones.
But, obviously, a new ethos of sharing digital knowledge and
information
is not something we can create with ethical imperatives. We should be
careful
in the face of moral diversity and propose ethical indicatives i.e.
recommendations
indicating possible alternatives, open to revision according to
different
kinds of arguments and situations. Declarations, like the ones of
UNESCO,
should be followed by programs as well as by a continuing debate.
Cyberculture
and digital libraries are not necessarily a uniform outcome of the
Western
cultural program but they should be seen within a wide range of
possibilities
for contamination with other media traditions. This is a big
ethical
challenge for design and use. The answer to it is a question of
interface
as well as of interspace design. We should do this on the basis of the
World Information Ethosas expressed in the Universal
Declaration
of Human Rights. But, as every written word, these rights need
interpretation
and application. This is the task of information ethics. UNESCO has
created
an Observatory on the Information Society that might become a
major
source of practical critical appraisal in our field: together
with the Infoethics website.

In
her paper for the UNESCO Congress Nancy John, Vice-President of the
International
Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) stressed two
critical roles of libraries in modern society: the access role and the
preservation role (John 1998). The preservation of local and global
cultural
heritage is indeed, together with the issue I have discussed, the
second
big ethical issue with regard to digital libraries. It is not my
intention
now to present the opportunities and constraints of this medium with
regard
to the responsibility of knowledge preservation for future generations.
I have made a small contribution to this subject at the international
conference Knowledge for the Future organized by the Institute
for
Philosophy
and History of Technology of the University of Cottbus (Capurro 1999
and
Kornwachs 1999). As my colleague Wolfgang von Keitz remarks, the
question
of long-term digital archiving should be stated and discussed,
otherwise
it could become like the situation with nuclear energy and its lack of
social acceptance due to the unsolved question of waste management
(Keitz
1997).

This
question includes not only the preservation of paper heritage in paper
and/or digital form but the one of digital heritage as well. The last
point
was discussed at the seminar Convergence in the Digital Age:
Challenges
for Libraries, Museums and Archives sponsored by the European
Commission
and a satellite event of the IFLA General conference 1998.
The challenge of archiving, restoration and communication practices in
the digital environment will be a major theme of the Joint Technical
Symposium
(JTS) to be organized in the year 2000 by the International Federation
of Film Archives (FIAF), the International Federation of Television
Archives
(FIAT) and the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual
Archives
(IASA), three Non Governmental Organizations whose prime responsibility
is the preservation and restoration of original image and sound
material
collections. UNESCO’s
Memory of the World Programmeis an important
international
effort to solve this problem.

Conclusion

The
ethical
problems of digital libraries are of both a global and local nature.
They
are closely related to fundamental human rights and, at the same time,
they are of major influence at the local level. The question of
inequality
of access due to various kinds of constraints (economic, cultural,
political)
is a major ethical and legal issue along with the question of knowledge
preservation and its transmission to future generations. In this paper
I have considered the question of access as a spatial problem
or,
more precisely, as a problem of integrating cyberspace into life-space.
The ethical problems of cyberspace and, consequently, the ethical
problems
of digital libraries concern the question of how to create a culture of
sharing and preserving digital knowledge. I call this kind of ethical
approach,
an ethics of care.

How
do we manage to bring digital libraries existentially close to people?
I have mentioned some possibilities of dealing with the challenge of
democratic
accessibility such as integrating digital libraries through community
freenets
and terminals set up in public spaces, particularly in public
libraries.
There is, of course, the economic problem at the local level,
particularly
in the case of developing countries. International governmental and
non-governmental
organizations have a special responsibility in this regard. Digital
libraries
should be considered under the democratic premise of basic information
provision or "informationelle Grundversorgung" as we call it in German.
From this ethical perspective the question of interface design should
be
considered as a question of democratic interspace design. This means,
again,
considering cyberspace in general and digital libraries in particular,
as belonging to people’s life-space. The management of information and
knowledge becomes an ethical imperative in a world of growing inequity
and, at the same time, of growing superabundance of digital information
and knowledge resources: 'Manage knowledge and information in order to
reduce inequity of access and support cultural diversity'.

Due
to the cultural complexity of human life-spaces and media traditions,
this
imperative must be translated into ethical indicatives, i.e. into
options
for practice and research. It is not possible to decide a priori
how this medium for sharing knowledge can be integrated within existing
media environments, legal, economic and political constraints, and
moral
milieus. We need various kinds of international digital and real forums
in order to further discuss the growing ethical and legal challenges of
digital libraries.

Winograd,
T. (1997): From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design. Published
online
by permission from Peter Denning, Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond
Calculation:
The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer Verlag, pp. 149-162.